active directory

Changing "Password will expire in X days" notification for Active Directory users in vSphere Web/H5 Client

11.17.2017 by William Lam // 1 Comment

When logging into the vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web (Flex) or H5 Client, one of the validation checks that is automatically performed by the server is to check the current users password expiry. If you account expiry is less than the current password expiry configuration, then you will see the yellow notification pop up at the top stating:

Password will expire in X days

This is definitely a helpful feature to have automatically built into the vSphere UI and the default expiry actually depends on the type of user logging into the system. This last part is sometimes confusing as folks mix up the default Single Sign-On User Expiry with the Active Directory user expiry which is completely different.

Single Sign-On Users

For SSO Domain (vsphere.local by default) users, the password expiry AND notification by default is 90 days. This can be configured in the vSphere Web Client under Administration->Single Sign-On->Configuration->Password Policy as shown in the screenshot below. For those wanting to automate this configuration, there is currently not an SSO Admin API, but there are some options, have a look at this blog post here.

Active Directory Users

If you are logging in as an Active Directory user, the password expiry notification by default is 30 days but the actual password expiry will obviously depend on your Active Directory system. If you want to change the expiry notification in case your expiry is not 30 days or you wish to notify sooner or later, this is actually controlled by the vSphere Web and H5 Client.

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Enabling shell access for Active Directory users via SSH to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)

10.09.2017 by William Lam // 5 Comments

I had a question the other day on whether it was possible to enable shell access for Active Directory users when logging into the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) via SSH? The answer is yes and though this is documented here, it is not very clear whether this is only applicable to SSO-based users only. In any case, the process to enable this is pretty straight forward and simply requires two steps which I have outlined below.

Step 0 - Ensure that your VCSA and/or PSC is joined to Active Directory before proceeding to the next step. If not, take a look at the documentation here for more details.

Step 1 - Login to vSphere Web Client and under Administration->System Configuration->Nodes->Manage->Settings->Access, go ahead and enable boh SSH and bash shell options. The first setting turns on SSH to the VCSA and the second setting allows users (local, SSO and AD) to access the shell on the VCSA.

Step 2 - In the vSphere Web Client and under Administration->Single Sign-On->Users and Groups->Groups, select the SystemConfiguration.BaseShellAdministrators group and add either an AD User and/or Group that you wish to allow to access the shell.

Once you have completed the steps above, you can now SSH to your VCSA/PSC using the AD user (UPN format) that you had authorized earlier. In the example below, I am logging into one of my VCSA using user *protected email* and as you can see, I am placed into the appliance shell by default.

At this point I can access all the appliancesh commands just like I normally would if I had logged as a root or *protected email*.

If we wish to change to bash shell, we simply just type "shell" which will enable shell access, assuming you had performed Step 2.

One thing that I noticed is that the default home directory for the AD user is /var/lib/nobody and apparently that does not exists by default, so users end up in / directory by default after enabling shell access. I am not sure if this is also related, but the username shows up as nobody as you can see from the prompt. This is something I will share with Engineering to see if we can improve upon as I am sure most of you would rather see the user that is actually logged in.

The good news from an auditing and logging standpoint is that for operations that are logged, it does properly show the username even though the prompt is showing up as nobody.

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All replicated Platform Services Controller should be joined to Active Directory

06.16.2015 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Last week a colleague of mines was setting up a new vSphere 6.0 environment which contained a vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller (PSC) for our Management vSphere Cluster and another vCenter Server also with an external PSC for our Compute vSphere Cluster. The PSC's were configured to replicate with each other which meant they were part of the same SSO Domain providing us with the new Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.0.

With ELM, you can now easily view all of your vCenter Servers by logging into either of the vSphere Web Client Servers provided by any of the vCenter Servers that are connected to the replicated PSCs. In addition to providing a single view into your vSphere environment, data such as Licensing, Tags, VM Storage Policies, Roles/Permissions & Affinity/Anti-Affinity Rules to name a few are also replicated and made available to all the other vCenter Servers.

As part of the initial setup, my colleague had joined the first PSC (psc-01) to our Active Directory domain after completing the deployment of the VCSA, as the vSphere Web Client was required to make further changes to the PSC. The question that my colleague had was whether or not additional PSC nodes were required to be joined to the same Active Directory domain or would it automatically be handled by the PSC replication?

This was actually a great question and in fact something that could easily be overlooked or at least until you try to login using an Active Directory account and can not. What you will notice when going to the SSO Admin Configuration screen is that the Active Directory Identity Source has been added, so I can see why one would assume this would automatically be handled. If we take a closer look at my home lab environment and the Active Directory configuration within each of the PSC, we will see why this not the case.

If we take a look at the Active Directory configuration for psc-01, we can see that it is part of our AD Domain and the "Join" option is grayed out.

If we now take a look at psc-02, you will see that the Active Directory configuration is empty and the option to "Join" is still available.

To resolve this problem, you just need to add the additional PSC nodes to Active Directory and then reboot for the changes to go into affect. The PSC's also support different Active Directory domains as long as a trust relationship exists between the two, for more details take a look at this VMware KB 2064250. It should also be noted that this should not be an issue for those deploying a Windows based vCenter Server since it is usually a best practice to joined the Windows system to an AD Domain prior to installing additional software on top.